Reading and Writing
Stage 1: Early beginners
Radicals
There are 214 radicals (部首) in the Chinese language. The above table comes from the Chinese Character Database created by the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The radicals are meaningful. Some of them can appear by themselves as Chinese characters whereas others need to be combined with other components to form characters.
The wood radical 木 is an example of the former whereas the roof radical 宀 is an example of the latter. When a radical is combined with another component, we can usually guess the meaning of the resulting character. For example, 柏 is a combination of 木 and 白. Even if we don’t know that 柏 means “cypress,” the 木 radical tells us that it has something to do with “wood.”
The table to the left, which appears on a wikipedia webpage, contains 201 of the 214 radicals. If you go to the webpage and click on each of the radicals, you will be able to see its meaning and stroke order. Very often, the radical’s evolution is also provided.
The good news is you only have to learn a subset of the radicals. The diagrams to the left come from the YouTube channel Chou Meizai, which features videos of common radicals and characters.
Basic Principles of Chinese Characters
This video provides a great visual introduction to the basic principles of Chinese characters.
Dr. Amelunxen has created a stroke order tool that allows us to input any Chinese characters and see the stroke order, e.g., 我學寫字 in the screenshot to the left. When we hover the cursor over a character, we’ll be able to see the stroke order.
Dr. Amelunxen has incorporated his stroke order tool in many Cantonese stories available on the Internet. To the left is an example from Storybooks Canada. Please click on this link to see all of the Cantonese stories with the tool on his website.
It’s time to learn how to read and write Cantonese!
Here are the first 10 numbers:
The YouTube video to the left shows you the first 10 numbers in Chinese with Cantonese pronunciation written in Jyutping underneath each number.
Please go to this webpage to see the stroke order for each number.
Would you like to be able to read authentic Chinese menus?
The menu to the left comes from Philadelphia Chinatown (Leung & Wu, 2012). The menu to the right comes from this website.